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Thursday, 28 February 2013

Writers are often asked how we feel when we've finished writing a book. Is there a sense of relief? Are we sad? Do we actually type 'The End'?

Having answered this question in schools many times, it only struck me the other day, roughly a decade since my first book was published, that I never feel I've got to the end. I finish the book, certainly. I write the final line. But the book never feels quite finished, not because I don't type The End (does anybody?) but because every time I open the book, even when printed, I feel I could make a change: a sentence more precisely written; a better word chosen; a comma that's begun to irritate. Worse, and particularly with a historical novel, I absolutely dread finding something new about the period, something that would have been transformatory to include. As a defence, once a novel is finished, I studiously avoid any dangerous reference books or articles. Despite this, facts I didn't know contrive to slip into publications or conversations about something completely different - some snippet on armour in a piece ostensibly about garden hoses; an observation about sailing ships in a romance; a desert colour in a fashion shoot.

These little facts lurk with the sole purpose of leaping out to slap me in the face. 'Oh crikey!' I think more often than any reader imagines, 'I want my manuscript back'. Naturally, I contrive to forget the fact as soon as possible. It's the only way to get a decent night's sleep. But though I occasionally forget my dogs' names, reducing them to 'hey, dog', and almost always forget to empty the washing machine, those pesky unwanted facts stick. If I can't include them, my book seems more incomplete than ever.

Do other authors experience the same agitations and alarms? Even after proofs and copy-editors, more proofs and the application of the pedant's toothcomb, even, indeed, many years after publication, do other authors still feel their work is still wanting a final something?

My hunch is 'yes'. If you listen carefully to authors giving a public reading, you'll often find they don't read exactly what's written in the book. They 'improve' it. And why not? It's the author's work. I've seen authors take a pen and rewrite on the hoof. I do it myself. It seems that writers must learn to cope with never truly finishing until they're dead and buried, and even then I'm not sure they rest easy.

Despite the above, finishing writing a book, even if one never really feels it to be 'the end', is a moment to mark. I'm marking such a moment now. My first foray into the adult world of fiction, the novel for which I, like my characters, have been learning the Goldberg Variations, is finished and, to my great joy, has been bought by Virago. 'Sedition' will be published in summer 2014. Then begins something new - the long road to the reader.

I've marked the ending of this stage in Sedition's journey as I mark all similar endings: by grabbing a saw. Hacking away at my manuscript is swiftly followed by a cathartic hacking away at unruly bits of the garden. The dogs look on with some concern. What will happen when the garden can be pruned no more? They watch me for a while, then creep back inside, counting their legs.

Wednesday, 27 February 2013

'I should like to know the true identity of this Madame Lauriol du Barny who gave her

name to such a sumptuous flower. I assume she must have belonged to the haute cocotterie

of Paris. Or perhaps I am completely wrong and she was a perfectly respectable woman,

the wife of a rose-grower from Lyons ….'

Vita Sackville West

I've been wondering myself ever since I planted my own first rosebushes, years ago - Madame Gregoire Staechelin, Madame Albert Carriere, and Sarah van Fleet. Who were they? What did they do to deserve it? Why the men's names?

Who was Ghislaine de Feligonde? Who were Madame Isaac Péreire, Madame Plantier, Felicite Parmentier and Fanny Elssler and Zephirine Drouhin? Who were Bessie Johnson and Ena Harkness, Penelope and Albertine, La Belle Sultane, and Josephine? Was Dorothy Perkins named after Dorothy Perkins, or vice versa? Who were all those Duchesses, Montebello and Buccleugh and du Berry? And who inspired the Rosa Mundi?

So I found out. Well, I found out some. Let us start with Madame Isaac Péreire

1) The Rose

Bourbon

OriginGarçon, France

Flower size 9cm

ScentStrong and sweet, nectarines and raspberries

FloweringRemontant in flushes

Height2.5m

Spread2m

Madame Isaac is opulent of flower - very double - but scraggy, long limbed and prone to blackspot. Its colour has been described as 'rich pale crimson fading to lilac or silver at the edges'; bright fuchsia, raspberry, purplish rose madder, and 'strident pink … fights a losing battle against the inroads of magenta' (Jack Harkness). It is thorny with little buds, in clusters of up to five, and smells as fine as any rose you ever smelt.

2) The Lady

Her name was Mademoiselle Fanny Péreire, and she was born in 1824. How she managed to be Mademoiselle and then Madame of the same name came about like this.

The Péreire brothers, Émile (1800–1875, left)and Isaac (1806-1880, right), were bankers from Bordeaux, of Sephardi Jewish Portuguese descent, though converted now and devoted followers of St Simonism. St Simon believed that the sole purpose of Royalty was to protect a nation's poor from its rich, so he was an admirable choice of saint for such phenomenally rich people.

Their grandfather was Jacob Rodrigues Pereira, one of the inventors of sign language for the deaf, who left Portugal and became an interpreter for Louis XV. The brothers made their fortune during the Second Empire by developing the railway in north-east France, by building, finance and tourism. In 1852 they founded Credit Mobilier, and they were closely involved with Haussman, in financing the reconstruction of Paris with its grands boulevards. It went bust, but they were protected by their empire of art and vineyards, hotels and tourism, baths, LaCompagnie Generale Transatlantique; and their many overseas interests. Though their name is no longer very well-known, much that they founded still exists, and though Place Péreire in Paris has been officially debaptised, the metro station Pereire survives (Line 3, between Wagram and Louise Michel). In their heyday they were well-known as rivals - and neighbours - of the Rothschilds.

The brothers worked closely together, had neighbouring offices, and lived together in Paris. Closeness of family and, once they had made their fortune, closeness of its maintenance, was all to them. This was not unusual among Jewish families at the time: having been chased from pillar to post, they liked to keep things compact. At 24 Émile married a cousin, Rachel Rodrigues. Isaac married first Laurence Fonseca, who died in 1837, leaving two children, Eugene and George. Then in 1840, aged 34, he remarried - to his brother Émile's eldest daughter, his neice Fanny, then aged 16.

Isaac was, it is reported by his biographer, 'imposant mais non denue de charme . . . austere et sage' (imposing but not without charm . . . austere and wise). Fanny, apparently, was not unwilling. But the Code Napoleon forbade actually consanguineous marriages, so they had to apply to Napoleon III himself for special permission. They got it, only for Émile, who had previously given his blessing, to have second thoughts. In the end his brother and his daughter re-persuaded him.

The marriage was a great success. Fanny bore Isaac three more children, Isaac andÉmile continued to work together, and they all lived together in the truly splendid Hotel Péreire, at 35 rue de faubourg Saint-Honore - currently the British Embassy. They also built together and shared a couple of country retreats: a huge seaside chalet at Arcachon, from 1862, and a massive chateau at Armainvilliers, with a wing for each family and a grand communal salon. In the hall of the chateau the Péreires installed, if you please, a ship and a locomotive, to remind them where their money came from. Their taste and their wealth also ran to works by Rembrandt, Murillo, Franz Hals, Rubens, Vermeer and Ingres. A contemporary cartoon shows people bowing and scraping before a man who 'est lie avec l'oncle de la soeur du filleul de M Pereyre' (is linked with the uncle of the sister of M. Pereyre's youngest - which I think works out as the other M Péreire). Queues for their entertainments in Paris would reach three deep as far as the Madeleine.

The Rothschilds were neighbours in Paris and in the country - though the Péreire country estate alone was 4,000 hectares, so they weren't exactly banging knees. In Paris on one occasion when the Rothschilds next door were holding a soiree, the Péreire children let loose rabbits into their garden. Hauled up, they explained that they were 'nuisibles' - a nuisance. History does not relate whether this was seen as a good reason for letting them out.

The Péreire wealth was not only for ostentation: they were a very charitable family, and held to the Simonistic beliefs. After her very sick daughter was saved by a doctor in Gretz Armainvilliers in 1878, Fanny donated a hospital to the neighbourhood. The chateau was demolished in 1950; the park which is there now is called Parc Péreire.

After the deaths ofÉmile and Isaac, Fanny looked after both families. In her picture she looks opulent and benevolent, and true wealthy wife and Second Empire Madame, with white shoulders at the fashionable slope of the time, lace, drapes, centre parting and a resigned expression.

In 1880, the year of Isaac's death, Jacques Julien Margottin, rose grower from Bourg-la-Reine, near Paris, spotted the rose in the nursery of a grower called Garçon. Garçon had already registered it as Bienheureux de la Salle, in honour of St Jean Baptiste de la Salle. Margottin acquired the patronnnage of Madame Isaac to pay for the rights, and distributed the rose under her name in 1881. He seemed to have forgotten to mention Garçon.

In 1909 Mme Isaac's great granddaughter Noémiemarried a Rothschild. It seems somehow right.

Tuesday, 26 February 2013

Slipstreaming Celia’s wonderful blog Shadows in the Cave, I’ve kept to the realm of the cave with Stories that Float from Afar.

An entrance into a coastal cave in the Robberg Peninsula in South Africa

a cave entrance into the Pyrenees evokes a passage in another world

The concept of the rock face as a veil separating man from the spiritual world is evidenced in the paintings often being found in the deepest, darkest, almost inaccessible places, with animals often painted disappearing or reappearing from a crack in the rock surface. The artist seems suspended between two worlds and the animals are embodiments of power. They bring rain, they transform, they bring ill fortune, also luck and are often seen walking along a thread of light, probably a symbol of energy, that in modern times might be seen as a current of energy.

The paintings have been linked to ritual moments that induce an almost hypnotic state of trance. One can imagine as Celia mentions in her blog the flickering shadows cast on the rocks from burning tallow, creating atmospheric affects. The animals must have appeared to come alive. The lighting, together with the music, drumming and dancing that accompanied the ritual, must have created what can now be seen almost as the first audio-visual representation of storytelling. In fact it has all the essentials of modern film… all very real.

Quoting from The Shaman of Prehistory –Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves by David Lewis-Williams retired Professor of Cognitive Archaeology and Jean Clottes, the renowned French expert on Rock Art:

Shamans from many parts of the world, acquire an association with a spirit-animal and the supernatural potency that it bestows. It is this potency that empowers them to heal the sick, control the movements of animals, change the weather and preform other shamanic tasks.

The eland - a southern African antelope has long been associated with potency

sketch of above shows clearly shaman with same crossed-leg posture - his head transformed an eland

I tried to capture a moment of transformation in my novel, Fish Notes and Star Songs where two teenagers are given shamanic powers:

The rock was starting to gleam. Layer upon layer of men and animals came floating up towards us. Surrounding us. Dancing and chanting. The cave wall had grown vaporous. I reached out to touch it. There was nothing there… only music filling the space.

Music… and the feeling of my body changing. Out of the darkness a cheetah stared back at me. Eyes reflecting amber. Sleek shoulders spotted with black and gold. High, honeyed cheekbones ridged with black. ‘Come!’ The word was more a pant than a word. I stepped forward. Felt the strange weight of my flanks. Felt the heaviness of horns on my head. I flicked my head from side to side. Snorted the dust from my nostrils. The earth seemed to reel.

Much of what we know of rock art and shamanistic belief has come from discovering the stories of the San through the voice of a man called //Kabbo in the Lloyd and Bleek manuscripts. In the 1860’s – 1870’s //Kabbo was truly suspended between two worlds… captured for so-called sheep stealing from his home deep in the interior of Southern Africa, he was brought to Cape Town and committed to hard-labour building the new Victoria breakwater. His name //Kabbo means ‘dream’ and through him and the painstaking work of William Bleek and his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, the first people to find a way of transposing the San spoken word into written English, he was able to tell of the beliefs of the early rock artists.

And in the words of //Kabbo explaining our place on earth:
‘Therefore we are stars –we must walk the sky because we are heaven’s things.’
And explaining the concept of story, or kukummi, as his people called it:
‘Story is like the wind, it floats from afar’.

Monday, 25 February 2013

All the fuss about the discovery of Richard III's remains has set me off thinking about the treasures that lie beneath our feet. To be a treasure, the find doesn't have to be grand. I once stayed in a house where it was impossible to do even the smallest gardening task without finding parts of those white clay pipes people used to smoke.

I never found one in as good shape as this

Even though the discoveries became routine, I never ceased to be excited by them, imagining some old bloke puffing away in the past.

Now I want your help in identifying an object that has come my way. It was found by an enthusiast with a metal detector. I don't know where, and I don't know when.

I'ts a little container. I've photographed it alongside a 3-pin plug, to give you an idea of its size.

It's not very deep.

It's heavier than it looks (6oz/150gms) and not magnetic. Its weight, and shiny bits on the bottom and the underside of the lid, suggest it might be made of lead, but the greenish patina makes me wonder whether it could be a lead-copper alloy.

The underside of the lid (above), and the bottom of the box (below)

I have made no attempt to clean the box up, because I like its tarnished look - but even so, you can see that some of the decoration on it is quite fine.
Although heavily marked by age, the box seems to be very well-made. The lid fits perfectly onto the base whichever wayy you turn it. The metal on the lid is cut out to make a pattern of leaves and roses, with a large central flower.

I wonder whether the openwork lid indicates that the box was intended to store something fragrant.

The floral design is repeated almost exactly on the inside of the base. The differences in that image are sufficient to suggest that it was not stamped or cut by the same machine, or cast in the same mould as the lid. Might the decoration be hand worked?

This interior detail would, of course, be seen only by the owner of the box, which implies that it might have been something special, intimate, and not just for show.

There are more roses and leaves around the edge of the base.

Have any of you seen something like this before? Do you have any idea how old it might be?
I keep earrings in it. What do you think the original owner used it for?
I love this little box. But is it ancient, a little bit old, or is it something I could have bought in a poundshop last week?

Sunday, 24 February 2013

BY ESSIE FOX

Sadly, I'm going to have to leave The History Girls, for a while at least. The reason for this is that I need to write a new novel by June of this year - and as that novel is now consuming my every waking (and sleeping) hour it seems appropriate to use this final blogpost to talk about one of that book's inspirations.

Here he is - and how beautiful! This is the Maharajah Duleep Singh who became the Sikh ruler of the Punjab when he was no more than a child. But with family intrigues and treachery never being far behind (not to mention the fact that the Punjab was such a valuable territory, dividing India from Afghanistan - the passage through which the Russians might threaten to enter India and therefore endanger the British rule) in due course the Punjab was annexed at the end of the second Anglo Sikh war.

In 1849, when that short war ended, the boy maharajah gave up this throne to be raised by a British army officer, in whose care he eventually converted to Christianity - after which he was sent to England and raised as a gentleman aristocrat, well away from those who might have sought to use him as a political pawn.

He became a very great favourite of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. The portrait of Duleep above was painted by Victoria who called the prince her 'beautiful boy' and who often had him accompany her own family on holidays spent in the Isle of Wight.

This glorious painting by Winterhalter, one of Victoria's favourite artists, shows Duleep in all his princely robes with a backdrop of a palace in Lahore.

But, something else was brought from Lahore when Duleep was to lose his throne - and that is shown above in the illustration by Tavernier - the precious diamond, the Koh-i-nor, which was taken from Duleep as ransom, with all too little consideration that the stone was not only the Punjab's sovereign symbol but also that it was revered as being a sacred Indian stone.

The diamond was exhibited in 1851 at The Great Exhibition in London after which it was cut down from what had been its original size to be made into a brooch - commissioned by Prince Albert and then presented to his wife.

However, at the time when Duleep was posing for Winterhalter in the White Room at Buckingham Palace, the Queen - perhaps in a moment of guilt, or perhaps as a test of his loyalty - presented the seventeen year old boy with the diamond that he had once owned. It has been documented by those who were present at the time that Duleep appeared to be confused, but then perhaps he realised that this was a test that he must pass, after which he offered it back to the Queen and said, 'It is to me, Ma'am, the greatest pleasure thus to have the opportunity, as a loyal subject, of myself tendering to my sovereign, the Koh-i-nor.'

Duleep went on to grow up in England and lived in great splendour at Elvedon Hall. When he married ( a girl met in Egypt) the couple had several children and Prince Victor, the second, but first to live, was christened at Windsor Castle, with the Queen standing as god-mother, after which she wrote in her diaries, 'I never beheld a lovelier child, a plump little darling with the most splendid dark eyes, but not very dark skin.'

But, his father's skin remained dark and beneath it his soul remained Indian. In later years Duleep was to be influenced by Russian and Irish dissidents. Reminded of all that he had lost, the prince was increasingly dissatisfied, often writing to Victoria and requesting the return of the Koh-i-nor, complaining that the East India Company failed to make sufficient recompense for the loss of his wealth and sovereignty. In time he renounced his Christian faith, re-embracing his native Sikh beliefs. He plotted a 'holy rebellion', intending to lead an army into India by route of Russia and Afghanistan.

However, all such efforts were doomed to nothing but failure. Duleep's intentions were exposed resulting in his exile from the shores of England, and India. With his wife and their children remaining in England, the prince and his London mistress lived upon the continent - where they suffered levels of poverty that Duleep had never known before.

But, before his premature death from a stroke at the age of fifty-six, he met with Victoria again when she visited the French town of Grasse. There, and quite against the wishes of her advisers, she privately pardoned the bloated bald prince who had once been her cherished beautiful boy. And soon after that, when she heard of his death, she had his remains brought back 'home' where she gave him a Christian burial. In death, she reclaimed her prodigal son.

And, as to the Koh-i-nor, to this day the diamond remains among the crown jewels in the Tower of London. But there are many stories told about its mystical properties - and some even say that it is cursed.

Queen Alexandra wearing the Koh-i-nor in her coronation crown

One myth surrounding the stone was that if it was ever returned to its homeland all foreign invaders would be cast out - which was why Duleep wanted to have it back when plotting to reclaim his throne. Another says that only a queen may ever safely hold the stone. And that is somewhat ironic, for, having placed the diamond directly into Duleep's hands, it is almost as if Victoria ensured the fate of the prophecy, that any man who touches it will be doomed to see his family line 'disappear from the light'. Despite Duleep fathering several children, every one of them died without progeny.

And as to the legend that any queen who possessed diamond would rule the world, it was certainly true for Victoria - the queen who commanded an Empire and was later crowned Empress of India.

Essie Fox writes Victorian gothic novels. There are extracts, images and information on her website: essiefox.com.

Saturday, 23 February 2013

I was given a copy of the 1899-1890 Girls' Own Annual when I was a teenager, by an old family friend; I don't know where she got it from: maybe it came from her mother, but she is dead now and I cannot ask her. It's a shame that we often don't ask people things until it is too late. It wasn't the kind of 'Christmas Special' that annuals were in my childhood, just the bound-up numbers of that year. I read them with great interest; the serials - 'Work, Wait, Win'; 'Kathleen's 'Handful,'' Elsie's Victory,' and the truly revolting 'Story of a Summer,' whose heroine, Winifred, gave up the man she loved and who loved her, so that her cousin could have him.

Kathleen's 'Handful.'

A high-risk strategy, if you ask me, but in the story the man obligingly did fall in love with the beautiful but emotionally-constipated Eva (Eva loved him, and Winifred 'knew' that Eva would only love once. Odd, that Victorian superstition. ) Winifred ended up devoting herself to her mother, a tyrannical invalid, and became the Angel in the House, though at the time I didn't know about that image. In the other stories, the heroines, especially Kathleen, were luckily less door-mattish, or I might have ended up binning the volume, and that would have been a pity.I read the advice from 'Medicus' - largely common-sensical - the historical articles, which amused me because I had travelled into history to look back at history. I made some of the 'home-made sweetmeats' toffee, and cocoa-nut tablet. They were good.

The book sat neglected, through my adult life after that - till I began to write about Victorian times, and then I remembered it, feared I had got rid of it, and whooped with pleasure when I found it. It is a mine of things that authors want to ask. I set my novel The Mountain of Immoderate Desires in 1899, just because I had such a wealth of material to hand in that volume. And I made Lily, the heroine of The Mountain, possess some copies of the paper, and use its words - usually in ways that would have horrified the virtuous Christian publisher - for guidance.
How useful I found: 'Dress: In Season and In Reason,' by the 'Lady Dressmaker', when I wanted to envisage the fashions of that era.

I think the lady on the left, particularly, looks as if she would run on wheels. See my post-it in the top corner.

There was a wonderful series of articles called: 'On the Purchase of Outfits for India and the Colonies.' From it I learned that each passenger on the P&O steamers (such as went to Hong Kong) was allowed a whacking 336lbs of luggage and that travellers to the East needed 'the tin boxes with plain pine covers, which are made for the purpose, for, owing to the climate and the insects, everything must be kept in tin, or else it will be spoilt.' Having lived in Hong Kong, I was familiar with the mould-inducing damp and the depredations of cockroaches that made this precaution necessary; and we too kept food in insect-proof containers and tins, if they weren't in the fridge. I also learned that woollen underwear was considered best for really hot climates, something I thought hilarious, till someone told me that really fine wool is excellent for wicking perspiration away from the skin. That was, of course, after I had made fun of my hero Samuel's woollen underwear in the novel, and it had been published. Oh, well..

Later, I found another volume in a second-hand bookshop, for 1899, and I bought that, just for interest. However, I do recommend the GOP for anyone wanting advice on the small domestic details of Victorian life. It was from the 'Answers to Correspondants' column that I discovered that ladies in 1889 were already learning how to operate a type-writer. The 'Girls' Own' title is misleading; the paper was intended not only for teenage girls but for young women setting up as housekeepers and others who wanted to train for a career. So it is a mine of information if you want to find out about Victorian women's work. I'm sure copies can be located nowadays on the web.

The 1899 volume has a set of chatty articles called: 'Three Girl-Chums, and their life in London rooms.' 'Ada is a type-writer in a very good office in the City. She has got on so well that she is earning £100 a year. Jane is a cookery teacher in a distant parish,' and Ada's sister. Marion Thomas lives with them and does the house-keeping for them, but she is working up 'a connection of music pupils.' What may be particularly useful to writers - perhaps to me, some day, is the detailing of the money they spent on their household items - two small enamel saucepans at eightpence-halfpenny and sixpence-halfpenny, a rolling pin at a shilling, weights and scales at fourteen shillings and sixpence - that's an expensive item, but we have upstairs a set of weights and scales perhaps of similar vintage, which my mother-in-law used till her death.

These kinds of minute details might be useful if you wanted to have your characters take a trip to Paris at the period. You could go for six pounds, if you were careful, and the article shows you exactly how. As well as the Louvre, Notre Dame, Chateau de Vincennes, etc, on the list of must-sees is the Morgue, where unidentified corpses were exhibited - supposedly for relatives to find missing loved ones, but in practice it became a ghoulish reality-show. Clearly 'our girls' had strong stomachs.

There's also a series called 'In Mine House,' by Lina Orman Cooper (author of 'The King's Daughter, etc.' Not 'authoress', I noticed with satisfaction.) Miss or Mrs Cooper can tell you just how jam was made in the nineteenth century and of her 'old lady's' (her mother's?) preference for not covering her jam-pots. 'If well boiled and made of fresh sound fruit, it should jell enough to keep without excluding air. A sheet of newspaper laid over the rows of pots' is all that is needed. But your jam-cupboard must be well ventilated. Lina knows how to do DIY, too. 'How well it is when the mistress of a house can wield hammer and gimlet and screwdriver' she tells us, thus driving another nail into the coffin of preconceptions about Victorian womanhood. You may find out, too, what was recommended for the Victorian medicine cupboard: 'some sweet nitre for feverishness, and some pilules of aconite; spirits of camphor for a cold, and a screw of lump sugar;' and many more.

Then there are the above-mentioned 'Answers to Correspondants.' The GOP's answerers supplied quotations the 'girls' wanted, told them how to deal with illness in their children, or 'a wild, unmanageable, girl' (send the clergyman to admonish her first, if all else fails, send her to a Home); opined on their handwriting (often severely), or the poetic offerings they sent up 'quite the usual thing we receive,' one poor girl was brutally told, 'not at all worth printing.' The GOP was often rude or at least forthright. 'The lady always speaks first, not the gentleman, so you were in the wrong, of course'. There is advice about how to train as a nurse, and as a teacher of the deaf; information about a Pension for Protestants on the Normandy coast (why did Protestants need a special Pension of their own? Maybe so that they wouldn't meet Marcel Proust),encouragement for a correspondant wrestling with 'bad tempers and evil thoughts', and a 'regret that we cannot recommend any depilatory.' Just as well; depilatories of the time probably removed your skin into the bargain. There is also advice on how to make a wrist support (perhaps as a result of too many hours at the type-writer?)
My favourite Answer to a Correspondant, however, is the one written to the enterprising young E.M.R.C. 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself. To receive clandestine love-letters, when you owe filial confidence to your mother and submission to her will and judgement, is most ungrateful as well as undutiful. But to take in letters of two men continually, through the blinds of your bedroom window, encouraging them both at the same time, is simply disgusting! 'How shall I squash them?' is a heartless question after so much encouragement. It would be well if your mother were informed of your unseemly conduct and would effectually 'squash' you.'
So who said teenagerdom was a post-war phenomenon?

Friday, 22 February 2013

The horsemeat contamination
debacle has thrown up familiar discussions in our household as elsewhere;
about the convoluted nature of our modern food chain and how vulnerable it
leaves us, and how passive our consumption is.

Grimani Breviary: February (Flemish), c1490

But how easy was it to feed your household
in February in the past, when production could be (largely) in your own hands
or at least in the hands of those working nearby? What was available and what
was being prepared for future months? What tasks out there in the yard or
garden would I have to be busy with right now if I couldn’t open the
fridge-freezer or nip to Tesco?

I’d rather vaguely assumed
that there was very little around to eat in February, that the diet must be
dull and barrel-scraping, relentlessly salty and lacking in variety –
especially once the restrictions of Lent kicked in: an added challenge for both
housewife and husbandman. And since pancake day I’ve been wondering whether
there were ever years in the past when the hens hadn’t even started laying by Shrove
Tuesday for this very egg-orientated feast (can any historian-chickenkeepers
out there enlighten me, please?).

The Anglo Saxons
apparently called February solmonath,
or ‘mud month.’ I don’t know whether the seasons were more advanced on the
Continent – but the Dutch called February Spokkelmaand,
or ‘vegetation month’ which, looking out of my window (there are actual icicles
today), seems very optimistic.

A glance at February
entries in the diary of the Somerset parson, William Holland, shows his
household busy even in this cold month of 1806:

Feb 8 – John finished
spreading the dung in the Paddock.

Feb 11 – Sent John
into the garden to prepare ground for potatoes. Turned the great horse into the
churchyard to stretch his limbs. Walked to Court House and got some seeds from
Furse, he had pease and beans very fine, and Early Peep potatoes. Rain came on
after dinner so we could not plant any.

Feb 12 – A fine
pleasant day. I put down my Early Peep potatoes and John planted carrots and
onions.

Feb 19 – This evening
sat by a good fire and with my family compared the Four Evangelists on the
Resurrection. (It would have been Ash Wednesday.)

Feb 20 – John went on
still very well in the garden but he was called off rather soon to go with our
little sow to the boar to Strinxon, Farmer Landsey went with him.

Plucking examples at random: 16th-century
household accounts at high-status Wollaton Hall show salt fish eaten in great
quantities during Lent, such as cod, eel, ling, pollack and lobbe. Salted and
dried, or salted and packed in barrels, which was called green fish. There was
also stockfish, which was air-dried, and preserved herring. And there was fresh
fish available in Lent from local suppliers and inland markets – historian Mark
Dawson in Plenti and Grase mentions a
great variety of fresh sea-fish and freshwater fish, including cod, skate,
turbot and thornback. Big households also had the advantage of fishponds on
their estates, for more readily caught bream, pickerel, pike, tench and by the
end of the century, carp.

For those that could
afford it, dried fruit was a part of the Lenten diet too – figs, prunes,
currants, almonds, and there were always spices and other flavourings to ring
the changes.

Giles Moore of Sussex
records various purchases on the 17th and 18th Feb 1663 for
‘an entertainment’, including a Quart
Bottel of Sack, 3 pecks of barley malt, Pullet, three nayle of Beef, halfe a
pound of sugar, spice, bread, butter, rosewater. A few days before, he’d bought
a gallypot of greene Ginger. (Though I should say it wasn’t quite Lent yet, as
a quick check in Cheney’s ‘Handbook of Dates’ shows that Easter was 19th
April this year.)

Spinacia oleracea,Otto Wilhelm Thome,Flora von Deutschland, 1885

There was greenery
too, if you planned ahead: 16th-century gardener Thomas Hill talks
about the importance of planting with Lent in mind. He says that spinach is the
‘plant aptest for Lent … the first
Pot-herb which is found in gardens about [this] time. This plant very well endureth … cold, frosts and snow.’ He
goes on to point out the merits of the ‘Carot
and Parsnep .. sown in harvest time to enjoy them all the Lent.’ And there
were other roots that would keep well until now – dried peas and beans, and stored
keeping apples and pears of very many kinds.

17th-century
Hannah Woolley gives us a Bill of Fare suitable for every Month in the Year,
and suggests for February:

A Chine of roast-Pork, Veal or Beef roasted, A
Lamb-Pye, and Mince-Pyes, a couple of wild Ducks, a couple of Rabbits, fried
Oysters, a Skirret-Pye. And
for the second course: A whole Lamb
roasted, three Widgeons, a Pippin-Pye, a Jole of Sturgeon, a cold Turkey-Pye.

By far the largest
section in 18th-century Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery is devoted to recipes for fasting food – from Crawfish
Soop to Buttered-wheat and Chesnut Pudding. She lists foods available at this
time of year, including: ‘many sorts of
cabbage and savoy, small herbs on the hot beds (i.e. hot with dung) also mint, tarragon preserved under glass,
chervil, sallary, marigold flowers and mint dried, beet-leaves, sorrel…’

I’ve barely scratched
the surface of this topic, but my overall feeling, having glanced over these February
choices from the past, is that although we pride ourselves on the range of year-round
food drawn from all over the world available to us - in the past (for those who
could afford it), there was quite a startling array of fresh or
readily-available food.

I don’t really approve
of hankering after the past per se, and am grateful not to have to be taking my
sow to the boar today in order to ensure a supply of pork for the months ahead
– but right now I’m thinking that it might be interesting to try a nice fresh pickerel served with colliflower and followed by a dessert of
Golden-pippin or Winter Pepperning,
or a Dagobent Pear… Anyone care to
join me?

Thursday, 21 February 2013

One of the many things I love about this blog is the opportunity to offer up bits of research that haven’t made it in to my novels or have done so in such a heavily fictionalised form their origins are lost. The robbery yesterday of £30 million in diamonds reminded me of two stories of 19th century jewel heists I read during my research for The Paris Winter (available for pre-order now, since you ask).

The first I like because of its elaborate set-up and was reported in the Bradford Observer April 29 1875. A couple, claiming to be English and accompanied by a servant, took a very nice apartment in Avenue d’Eylan for two months and paid in advance. They made themselves conspicuous by their lavish spending, particularly at the jewellers where they managed to spend six thousand francs in a week. The apartment was six hundred and fifty a month by comparison. They paid in cash and were, unsurprisingly, well liked. At some point the husband began negotiations to buy a set of diamonds for his wife costing 112 thousand francs. He and the jeweller agreed on the bargain price of 106 thousand and the jeweller was then invited to bring the diamonds up to the apartment and receive payment. Up he went into the fashionable sitting room and was invited to wait while the husband took the diamonds into the bedroom to show his wife. She was unwell, you see.

The jeweller saw signs of the wife’s presence in the apartment; her sewing box, her shawl, and there was also the comforting sight of bundles of bank notes on the side-table ready to pay him. He made himself comfortable and began to read the paper. It took him some three-quarters of an hour before he became suspicious. He found that he had been locked into the room and the bundles of bank notes were in fact ‘prospectuses’. He tried to ring the bell (this is my favourite bit) but the bell pull came away in his hand. It was another three-quarters of an hour before he could get any help as the concierge had been sent away on a complicated errand by the ‘servant’ of his customers. By the time anyone could work out what had happened the thieves had a two hour head start which was, apparently, all that they needed. They had left no clues, even removing any maker’s mark from a hat left in a cupboard, though they did leave a set of false whiskers behind them.

The second case involved some of the French Crown Jewels, most of which were sold off by the state in 1887. M. Lepée in Rue de Madeleine bought some of them which he displayed in the window of his shop. One morning the following year the managers niece came to open the shop and found the ten thousand pounds worth of diamonds were missing and the shop was full of the robbers tools, including a crowbar and a dark lantern. The shop would have lost a lot more, the thieves were obviously planning to open the safe, but it seems they were alarmed by some noise and fled. Not before they had paused for a snack though. It seems from the report they paused mid-robbery to have some ham. This proved to be a bad idea not just because they didn’t have time to open the safe, but because the police saw the name of the butcher on the meat wrapping and went to ask him if he’d sold ham to anyone suspicious recently. He had and was able to give a description of two men with foreign accents, a description that matched the one the concierge gave of two men who had been enquiring about the empty flat above the shop.

I didn’t find any room in the novel for ham loving criminals or doctored bell-pulls, though there are diamonds, betrayal and cruelty enough. I did find myself thinking though as I read these stories, why are we often so fond of jewel thieves from Raffles to Ocean’s 11? Is there something about people wearing jewels that cost more than most houses that means when they are stolen our moral sense is less offended than by other crimes, other robberies? Not that there is anything noble, roguish or charming about the diamond thieves in my book, but it is a trope, isn’t it? I’d be interested to know what you think.

Wednesday, 20 February 2013

It seems you can pick up bits of dead kings just about
anywhere now. We’re all still buzzing with the discovery of Richard III under a
Leicester car park, but over the last thirteen years in France they’ve managed
to identify the head of Henri IV, the blood of Louis XVI, and the heart of
Louis XVII, with an added bonus in the hair of Marie Antoinette. Honestly, it’s
enough to make you want to search the attic.

Richard III

Yet outside
the scientific and historical worlds these discoveries haven’t been greeted
with the same excitement as our own ‘Richard Crookback’ - and what I want to know is why. I'm a Francophile myself, I'm interested in all those kings, but there's something special about the Richard III discovery that sets it apart.

What is it?

The heart of Louis XVII is at least as good a story, and by far the most tragic. He was
the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the little Dauphin who was
imprisoned in the Temple under the name ‘Louis Capet’ and died there of
tuberculosis at just ten years old. He had been kept in in a darkened cell from
the age of eight, with no-one to wash or clean up after him, and was degraded
by being forced to sign a document confessing to incest with his murdered
mother. He probably never knew his parents had been guillotined and he was the
uncrowned King of France.

The Dauphin - Louis XVII

But did he really die that lonely prison death? Was the wracked
little body the doctors recorded as being covered in sores and tumours really
his? Perhaps it’s because the child’s treatment was so unbearable that rumours
abounded of his secret escape, and of the substitution of a dying pauper for
the wretched king. Baroness Orczy even wrote the novel ‘Eldorado’, in which the
Scarlet Pimpernel himself rescued the child, and part of me still wants to
believe it.

Some facts supported the theory. A prison guard called ‘Simon
the Shoemaker’ quit his job in 1794, and his widow later claimed he had smuggled the Dauphin to safety in a laundry basket. The story was given credence when in 1894 the coffin of the supposed Dauphin was exhumed and found to
contain the body of a man aged between 18 and 20. True, the body had already been moved once when it was rescued from
its mass grave, but still the questions remained.

Heart of Louis XVII - Associated Press

Not any more. One particular relic had been making the
rounds for centuries, and was even offered to Louis XVIII on the restoration of
the monarchy – the supposed heart of the Dauphin, which had been secretly removed
during the autopsy by Dr Philippe-Jean Pelletan, who ‘wrapped it in my handkerchief
and put it in my pocket without being seen’. Even the relic's story is full of incident. Pelletan kept it in alcohol in a jar on his bookcase, but as the
alcohol dried out the heart grew desiccated. In 1810 it was stolen, but when
the thief contracted tuberculosis himself he repented, and his widow restored
it to the doctor. In 1828 Pelletan gave it to the archbishop of Paris, but the
palace was vandalised in the July Revolution, the crystal container was
smashed, and the heart was finally discovered buried in a pile of sand. But
still it survived, and in 2000 scientists finally decided to put it to the test
of DNA.

There were obviously no living
descendants – but there was a dead ancestor. The hair of Marie Antoinette had
also survived in the form of cuttings taken when she was a child in Austria,
and when the two were compared the result was pretty conclusive. The chief
scientist, Jean-Jacques Cassiman, was far too cautious to say definitely that
the heart was that of Louis XVII – only that he was descended from Marie
Antoinette. The child’s heart has finally been removed from public display, and
been buried at the Saint-Denis basilica near the graves of his parents.

Henri IV and Louis XVI have had a sober time in comparison, but their stories too are worth considering. Henri
IV fell victim to the same fate as poor Cardinal Richelieu, being dug up and
decapitated during the French Revolution, and his head carried away to form
part of a private collection. It was at least kept in a nice padded box, and
over the years has changed hands many times, but (like Richelieu’s) it was
mummified, and it is still faintly possible to see traces of a face.

Henri IV reconstructed face

In 2010 scientists set to work identifying that face. They
were fortunate to have three clues to go on: a healed facial wound, a lesion
near his nose – and a pierced ear. The less squeamish can see a video of all
this here, but this picture gives at least a general idea.

Suggestive certainly, but nothing is definite these days
without DNA. Short of digging up poor Louis XVII’s heart yet again, it was hard
to see where a possible match could be found – until someone thought of this.

It’s perhaps the oddest of all of them. This gourd has been
in the possession of an Italian family for more than a century, and what they
found intriguing was the inscription partially shown below, which translates as
follows: ‘In the 21st of January this year Maximilien Bourdaloue soaked his
handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation… When it was
congealed, he put it in this gourd and gave it to me for two banknotes of ten francs
each.’

Handkerchiefs are clearly less durable than the blood of
kings, and there was no sign of such a thing when in 2011 the gourd was lent to
the University of Bologna for testing. There was, however, a sticky residue,
and when geneticists from Bologna and Barcelona examined it they found it
to be blood of a male of the right age and antiquity, who was also a ‘heterozygote’ - a compatible form for a person with blue eyes. The genetic pattern
itself was found to be extremely rare (scientists among us can find a more
intelligent description here), and it would be hard to find anything like a
match.

Enter (in its box) the head of Henri IV.

(I was going to include a picture, but it's really too gruesome for a family blog. The curious can see one here.)

Blood and head were
both tested for DNA, and the results made headlines. From this BBC site: They ‘share
a genetic heritage passed on through the paternal line,” forensic pathologist
Philippe Charlier told AFP. “They have a direct link to one another through
their fathers. One could say that there is absolutely no doubt any more.’
Voila. Two kings confirmed for the price of one.

Interesting stories? To a French fanatic like me they're
utterly fascinating, but still somehow not up to the
standard of Richard III. I was enthralled by the French discoveries, but when I
watched the documentary about the finding of Richard III I cried.

So why? Why? What is it about the discovery at Leicester that’s
so special?

Is it age? Richard III was already history when Henri IV was
on the throne, and to whippersnappers like Louis XVI and XVII he was ancient
history at that. But I don’t think that’s the answer. If it’s age that excites
us we can look at these 27 Anglo-Saxon skeletons discovered last year on
Salisbury Plain. Heck, we can look at this one exhumed in South Africa that’s
estimated at 2 million years old. It’s far, far more historically significant –
but it doesn’t make me cry.

Neither do Egyptian mummies, come to that. They’re kings,
they’ve been dead even longer, but maybe it’s almost too long. They lack
significance dead because we have no sense of them alive. The portraits are too
stylized to be meaningful, and if someone says the word ‘Tutankhamun’ I think
immediately of either a gold mask or something dead in bandages. An Egyptian
specialist would be horrified by that, but I suspect it’s a common layman’s
view.

Then is it the mystery? As an ardent Ricardian and great fan
of Josephine Tey, I’m all for anything that will smash the Shakespeare/Thomas
More myth and clear Richard III’s name – but his skeleton won’t do that. We’ve
learned a bit about scoliosis and the hunchback, but whether or not he killed
the Princes in the Tower – not so much. There’s far more mystery solved in the
case of Louis XVII than there is with poor Richard.

Is it the tragedy? The horrible details of post-mortem
injuries, the reality of that lonely grave for a man who should have had a
state funeral? It’s part of it, I think, and I’m warmed by the prospect
of the body finally being given the respect it deserves, but even Richard wasn't in the same league as ten year old Louis. If
tragedy were all, then Louis XVII would be king in this discussion even if he
never was in life.

Of all the possible explanations, I think our own H.M. Castor
came closest to the truth when she said in her post here: ‘We simply do not usually have the chance to
examine the remains of known individuals from history, to compare the sources
with the bone-hard evidence’. I don’t know the Anglo-Saxon skeletons or
Eqyptian mummies, but we all know Richard III. He’s what ‘1066 And All That’
would call a ‘Memorable King’, and he’s part of the more sensational narrative
of history. The discovery of his bones makes us look at the whole story again
with the sudden certain knowledge that it’s true. We may have known that with
our heads, but here are the bones, here was the man, and it’s true.

Richard III Skeleton - Image credit University of Leicester

But there must be something else. Louis XVI was well known,
so was the Dauphin, they have the same legendary quality of Richard, but still
we’re not stirred to the same degree. Nationalism, of course, Richard was British
and the two Louis are French, but to someone like me there’s no difference and
it’s my own reaction I’m trying to understand.

For me personally there is that one other thing, and it’s
this. Richard III was found under a car park. Not in a box or a gourd where he’d
been specially preserved, but just somewhere dumped and under our feet.
Millions of people have walked over his grave and never even known.

Currently doing the rounds on Twitter - credit unknown

That’s it. That’s where it is. When people say ‘the past is
all around us’ I doubt they’re really referring to kings under car parks, but
that’s surely part of what they mean. As Shakespeare wrote in ‘Hamlet’, ‘Imperious
Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’ So
he might. How many people have breathed this air before us? Whose bodies have
fertilized the soil from which we harvest our vegetables? Do we really think we
stand upon an island certified sterile from that terrible thing we call the
past?

It’s a macabre thought, and may give an unwelcome
significance to the phrase ‘Caesar Salad’, but there’s a truth in it way beyond
the physical. We’re not alone. We didn’t spring up by magic. Millions of people
have been here before us, and what they said and did has defined who we are
now.

That’s history. And as the body of Richard III has reminded
us – it’s true.

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